The Ikon Maker is Desmond Hogan's first novel, written in 1974 when he was twenty-three and first published in 1976.'She (Susan O'Hallrahan) loves her son with a passion that has reawakened her sexuality. When he flees her and his unhappy memories of childhood, she cannot stand her life alone and goes to England in search of him. There, suffused with the glow of a woman in love that turns the heads of young men on the street, she enters the world of her son's generation . . . Mr Hogan is a subtle writer. Crises have resolutions; life's common tragedies, as he makes us see, do not.' New York Times Book Review